TUNIS: Tunisia’s Prime Minister Ali Larayedh said Islamist militants are exploiting anarchy in neighbouring Libya to get training and smuggle weapons across North Africa’s porous borders.
His coalition government is grappling with an Islamist militant group known as Ansar Al Sharia, which is one of the most radical to emerge since Tunisia’s 2011 uprising against autocratic President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali.
Security is a sensitive matter for Larayedh’s ruling moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, which has agreed to step down in three weeks to end months of unrest set off by the assassination of two secular leaders by Islamist militants.
As well as Ansar Al Sharia, North Africa is home to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Islamist militants such as those led by veteran commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who claimed responsibility for the attack on Algeria’s Amenas gas plant in January, in which nearly 40 foreign workers were killed.
France’s military campaign to oust Al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters from Mali this year prompted some to enter southern Libya, where the government in Tripoli exerts scant control.
“There is a relation between leaders of Ansar Al Sharia, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Al Sharia in Libya. We are coordinating with our neighbours over that,” Larayedh, who was interior minister before becoming premier, said.
“Extremists in Tunisia have profited from the situation in Libya and they get their weapons from Libya. They have benefited and they have gotten training in Libya.”
Larayedh, who spent more than a decade in prison for being a member of a banned Islamist party before the uprising, was speaking shortly after Tunisian forces killed 10 members of Ansar Al Sharia near Goubellat close to the Algerian border.
Tunisian authorities said gunmen had attacked two police patrols in the north of the country and had been planning assaults on security force buildings and the military.
It was the worst violence in Tunisia since Larayedh’s government declared Ansar Al Sharia a terrorist organisation.
Reuters
